16 JUNE 1996
MAIL ON SUNDAY
By Kim Willsher
THE names of Lieutenant Colonel Radomir Furtula and Major Rajko Kusic will mean little to most people in Britain. But to the men of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and the innocent civilians of Bosnia, they strike a terrifying chord. A Mail on Sunday investigation discovered these the two Bosnian Serb officers accused of mistreating British peacekeepers held as human shield hostages. The officers, as we reported last week, are expected to be charged within weeks by the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague with breaching the Geneva Convention.
This is the story of those two men – the egocentric brigade commander and the swaggering brigand in whose bloody hands the fate of British soldiers lay after they were taken prisoner around the so-called safe haven of Gorazde in May last year. All 33 Fusiliers were released alive after being held for up to 17 days. They were lucky.
The Mail on Sunday has spoken to British soldiers who met the two men, Army intelligence sources both here and in Bosnia, and humanitarian agency workers and civilians whose paths crossed Furtula and Kusic. Army sources believe there is no doubt that these two men will be indicted for war crimes. And not just for their treatment of the Fusiliers. Both were at Srebrenica where up to 8,000 Muslim men were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces. And Kusic is reported to have personally rounded up Muslims in Rogatica, a town 10 miles from Gorazde, taken them to the local sawmill and mercilessly fed them into the machinery.
Like many of the brutal Serbian warlords who have gained a sinister notoriety in the Bosnian conflict, Lt Col Radomir Furtula, in his 40s, came from a family riven by ethnic hatred following the Second World War. His grandfather had fought and died with the extreme nationalist Chetnik forces, and many of his family were killed. Raised with such a bitter legacy it is hardly surprising that resentment simmered over the years and when the opportunity came to wreak his revenge with the outbreak of war in Bosnia in 1992 he grasped it with fervour.
BEFORE then Furtula had lived in Grbavica, a front-line mainly Serb suburb of Sarajevo, with his wife and two children, and worked as a professor of military tactics at the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) Marshal Tito barracks in the Bosnian capital.
When the mainly Muslim Bosnian Army captured the barracks on June 2, 1992, Furtula, then a captain, was pulled out and promoted to major with command of a local Bosnian Serb brigade. Later he was promoted again to lieutenant colonel and made commander of a mobile brigade around Gorazde, a town heavily defended by its Muslim population, 38 miles south-east of Sarajevo.
British forces who met him describe him as a `complete lunatic, unstable with an ego the size of an elephant’ who was known derisively, even among his own troops, as The Peasant. Stories abound of how the swarthy colonel had allegedly sworn a religious oath early in the war that he would bring victory to the Serbs in Gorazde.
Had he succeeded, he and his henchmen would undoubtedly have butchered the town’s Muslim men and boys and driven the women and children from their homes. Only one thing stood in his way: the men of the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
But Furtula had no hesitation in ordering his forces to turn their guns and heavy artillery on the UN peacekeepers, as he pursued what many describe as a private war. Furtula is believed to have been operating on his own initiative, without orders from the Bosnian Serb high command, when he commanded his forces to take the British soldiers hostage on May 28 last year.
Two days after Nato air strikes the first group of 25 Fusiliers were captured from their observation posts in the hills to the north of Gorazde. The Fusiliers, led by Lieutenant Hugh Nightingale, later awarded a Military Cross, were blindfolded and taken to separate secret locations.
One of them, Corporal Karl Roberts, 25, had a gun pressed to his head by a screaming captor, when a Nato plane flew over his makeshift prison. Another was woken in the middle of the night by his drunken captor who pulled a knife and drew it menacingly across his own throat.
IN THE following days a further eight Fusiliers were taken by Bosnian Serb forces to the east of the town, and then moved five times to foil any possible rescue attempts. The Fusiliers’ commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jona- than Riley, who received a Distinguished Service Order for his `inspired leadership’ during the hostage crisis, said taking his men prisoner was an `illegal and immoral act’. Riley says his men were certainly mistreated by their captors.
Furtula had previously been in contact with Col Riley over short-wave radios, but then flatly refused to speak directly with him over the fate of the hostages. An Army source said: `As commanding officer, Furtula is directly responsible for the taking of the hostages and for what happened to them.’
After taking the Fusiliers, Furtula said on Bosnian Serb TV that all UN soldiers were war criminals because they were helping the Muslims. But his actions pale in comparison with those of Major Rajko Kusic, known as the Butcher of Rogatica, and little more than a jumped-up thug. Kusic, a short, dumpy man with a droopy moustache, was not a professional soldier, but a militiaman in charge of an armed gang of ethnic cleansers. Before the war he worked as a foreman in an engineering factory at Rogatica, but when the conflict erupted he organised an irregular force of local Serbs known as the Rogatica Mountain Brigade.
A classic tin-pot brigand, he would swagger around armed with a pump-action shotgun, flanked by bandolier-swathed militiamen clutching heavy machineguns, terrorising local Muslims. As the Serb ethnic-cleansing juggernaut thundered across Bosnia leaving thousands of dead and dispossessed in its wake, Kusic rounded up Rogatica’s Muslims and gave them a choice. Stay or go. In fact, there was no choice. Those who elected to remain in the homes their families had lived in for generations were herded into the town’s sawmill and fed into the jaws of the machinery.
Those who decided to leave were given an hour’s head start, then hunted down like animals by Kusic’s men with dogs. When caught they were crucified on trees. ‘That,’ added the British source, `is how Kusic does business. It was a bloody nightmare for every-one including the British soldiers who came across him.’ Kusic’s campaign of terror extended to anyone who crossed his patch, as the Fusiliers discovered. They were repeatedly ambushed and engaged in heavy fire-fights by his men.
THOUGH Kusic is not believed to have been directly involved in the taking of the hostages, some are thought to have been held on military sites within his control, making him equally responsible for their welfare. Furtula and Kusic’s forces were undisciplined and brutal. For three months, the Bosnian Serbs besieging Gorazde had refused to allow supplies into the town, forcing the British troops to survive on emergency rations and take refuge in underground shelters during particularly heavy artillery attacks. Many lost weight and were suffering from vitamin deficiency which affected their skin and teeth.
Analysts are convinced Kusic and Furtula wanted to repeat the slaughter of Srebrenica at Gorazde. `It’s a terrifying thought, but you can be sure that’s what they intended to do,’ said the Army source. `Furtula came unstuck when he took the British hostages; he couldn’t get away with it. He should have known that they couldn’t take even one UN peacekeeper prisoner without incurring the wrath of Western forces.’
But while the hostages are now free, so too are Furtula and Kusic, despite a pledge by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to hand over known war criminals. Furtula is now a professor at the Belgrade Military School, and is planning to move his wife and two children, refugees in the Bosnian Serb town of Pale, to the Serbian capital.
Last night war crimes investigators, who already have depositions about Furtula from the Fusiliers, confirmed that their investigation into Kusic is `active’. `These men will be indicted,’ said the British source. But amid the cruel reality of Bosnian politics, he added: `Whether they will be brought to justice is anyone’s guess.’
